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Friday, June 19, 2009

There has been mass demonstrations in Iran right now protesting alleged fraud in the recent Iranian polls. Protesters are claiming massive vote rigging in the elections. I have been following news reports from various news agencies such as Al Jazeera and CNN. They reported the demonstrations but what was never reported are evidence of systemic poll frauds in the election. I was then shown an article by an acquaintance of mine and it seems Ahmadenajad may have won fair and square.

The Iranian People Speak

By Ken Ballen and Patrick DohertyMonday, June 15, 2009

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents' reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians -- including most Ahmadinejad supporters -- said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

Indeed, and consistently among all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another result consistent with our previous findings.

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal -- rather like a Persian Nixon going to China.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.

Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The groups' May 11-20 polling consisted of 1,001 interviews across Iran and had a 3.1 percentage point margin of error.

Images posted on Twitter apparently showing supporters of Mirhossein Mousavi who had been shot and injured

More pictures They were handing out the photocopies by the thousand under the plane trees in the centre of the boulevard, single sheets of paper grabbed by the opposition supporters who are now wearing black for the 15 Iranians who have been killed in Tehran – who knows how many more in the rest of the country? – since the election results gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more than 24 million votes and a return to the presidency. But for the tens of thousands marking their fifth day of protests yesterday – and for their election campaign hero, Mirhossein Mousavi, who officially picked up just 13 million votes – those photocopies were irradiated.

For the photocopy appeared to be a genuine but confidential letter from the Iranian minister of interior, Sadeq Mahsuli, to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, written on Saturday 13 June, the day after the elections, and giving both Mr Mousavi and his ally, Mehdi Karroubi, big majorities in the final results. In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi's camp would have wanted.

Headed "For the Attention of the Supreme Leader" it notes "your concerns for the 10th presidential elections" and "and your orders for Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president", and continues "for your information only, I am telling you the actual results". Mr Mousavi has 19,075,623, Mr Karroubi 13,387,104, and Mr Ahmadinejad a mere 5,698,417.

Yup, Tom Friedman Gets It Wrong, Again What Really Happened in the Lebanese Elections? By ESAM AL-AMIN

Since the Lebanese parliamentary elections on June 7, the mainstream media have declared that the results of the elections clearly show that Hizbollah and its coalition partners have suffered a “crushing defeat.” Some, led by the New York Times and cable news outlets, went even further, suggesting that the Cairo address by President Barack Obama was what made the difference, tilting the elections in favor of the pro-Western governing coalition.

This is pure fantasy, and reveals a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Lebanese politics and an ignorance of the realities on the ground.

Let us first get some facts straight. In the previous parliament, Hizbollah and its coalition partners held 58 seats to the 70 seats of the governing coalition in the 128-seat parliament. The governing coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain former Sunni prime minister and billionaire Rafik Hariri, consists of mainly parties and groups which are considered friendly to the West and pro-Western Arab governments such as Saudi Arabia. This coalition also includes the traditional Christian Maronite parties supported by the Maronite church, such as the Phalanges and the Lebanese forces. On the other hand, the opposition coalition is led by the mainly Shiite parties, Hizbollah and Amal, in alliance with a main Maronite party, the Free Patriotic Movement led by former General Michel Aoun. In the regional rivalry between the U.S., Israel, and other “moderate”Arab governments on one hand, and Iran, Syria and pro-resistance movements on the other, this opposition coalition clearly supports the latter.

One of the main contentious issues in the previous parliament was the insistence of the pro-Western coalition in demanding the disarming of the resistance movement Hizbollah, ever since Israel failed to dismantle the group’s infrastructure in the 2006 summer war. So the pro-Western groups have been trying to achieve politically what Israel failed to do militarily. The pressure applied by the U.S. during the Bush administration to achieve this very goal had been relentless, triggering a confrontation that lasted over a year and culminated in the recent elections.

Electoral politics in Lebanon is at odds with democratic principles because they are based on sectarian politics. Every major religious group is allotted a certain number of seats in Parliament, based not on population but on a previous agreement reached in 1989 to end 15 years of civil war. For instance, in the current election, the Shiites and the Sunnis had about 873,000 and 842,000 registered voters, respectively, but each group was given 27 seats. On the other hand the Maronite Christians and the Druze had 697,000 and 186,000 registered voters, yet were allotted 34 and 8 seats respectively, far greater than their numbers would entitle them. In addition, more than 120,000 Lebanese expatriates were paid, mainly by the Hariri clan, to fly back to Lebanon and vote. It’s estimated that more than three-quarters of them voted for the governing coalition.

With 52 per cent of about 3 million registered voters actually voting, the opposition led by Hizbollah’s coalition received 55 per cent of the vote (840,000) but only 45 per cent of the seats (57). Hizbollah itself fielded only 11 candidates in deference to its coalition partners, the same number it had in the previous parliament. All of them won their seats overwhelmingly. On the other hand, the governing coalition received 45 per cent of the vote (692,000) and 55per cent of the seats. In essence, the governing coalition won 68 seats, while independents won 3 seats, but later joined the governing coalition for a total of 71 seats.

In other words, the make-up of the current parliament changed only by one seat from the previous one, and that only happened after the independents were enticed to join the governing coalition. Moreover, the real surprise was that Gen. Aoun’s party, the coalition partner of Hizbollah, received, according to the results announced by the Lebanese interior ministry, 52 per cent of the Christian vote, though picking up fewer seats than his Christian rivals. Only in a fantasy world would such numbers be declared “a clear repudiation of Hizbollah’s coalition program,” as the clearly biased mainstream media, particularly the NYT’s Thomas Friedman ,would have you believe.

So the real story of the elections is that the will of the Lebanese people did not carry the day and the principle of majority rule was not respected. The Hizbollah-led coalition had indeed won more votes than the pro-Western coalition by a hefty 10 per cent. When President Obama received 53 per cent of the popular vote to John McCain’s 47 per cent last November, it was declared by the media and political pundits as a crushing defeat for the Republicans and a mandate for real change.

Lebanese politics is unpredictable. Today’s ally could be tomorrow’s nemesis. For instance, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was for many years Syria’s ally in Lebanon but turned against them a few years ago because of the political shift in the country. However, he recently started sending friendly overtures to the opposition. Though unlikely in the current political environment, but with the control of 8 seats, if he were to switch sides, then the make-up of parliament would become 65-63 in favor of the opposition.

The real question now is whether the new government, having a majority in parliament, will press for disarming Hizbollah in order to satisfy their patrons. If such a policy were to be carried out, it would immediately create a crisis and the majority of the Lebanese as shown on election day will be in the streets protesting and demanding that the real will they exhibited on election day be respected.

Below is the complete text of the letter, dated June 13, translated by CBS News:

Salaam Aleikum. Following your concerns regarding the results of the presidential election and per your given discretion to have Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remain as president during this sensitive juncture. Therefore, everything has been planned in a way that the public announcement will be made in accordance with the interests of the regime and the revolution. All necessary precautions have been taken to deal with any unexpected events of election aftermath and the intense monitoring of all the parties' leaders as well as the election candidates.

by Justin Raimondo, June 19, 2009 Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment The usual suspects are raising cain over the Iranian events: George Packer, who aptly describes himself as "a suspected neocon fellow-traveler," wants a full-throated expression of support for the "Green Revolution" from the White House, and argues (convincingly) that Obama, in spite of his abjuration against "meddling," has done everything but: his intellectual soul-brother, Andrew Sullivan — another supposedly "reformed" neocon, who has since recanted his role in cheerleading the Iraq war — has issued a foot-stamping encyclical demanding: "No Recognition of Ahmadinejad: This is the first and absolute requirement of all Western governments." One wonders what the second — and undoubtedly just as "absolute" — requirement is going to be: new and harsher economic sanctions? It’s just a coincidence that this non-recognition ploy would torpedo the much-vaunted prospect of negotiating with Tehran over the outstanding issues that separate Washington and Tehran: after all, we can’t negotiate with a government we don’t recognize.

Sullivan doesn’t want us to recognize — and, presumably, meet with — the Ahmadinejad faction if they come out on top, but of course it’s perfectly fine for our Secretary of State to meet with Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of what even the most pro-Israel among the nation’s magazine editors — Marty Peretz — calls a "neo-fascist" party. That Lieberman is also the foreign minister of Israel should certainly not make a lot of difference to the Andrew Sullivans of this world, unless their moral outrage comes attached to a particular agenda.

In all fairness, however, they probably don’t even know about the Hillary-Lieberman coffee klatch: as Laura Rozen described the atmospherics surrounding the meeting,

"There is not a lot of publicity about his visit, no doubt because Lieberman is a controversial figure at home and abroad, who has said Israel’s Arab citizens should be required to sign loyalty oaths."

Lieberman, I might add, has also called for the wholesale "transfer" of Israel’s Arab citizens out of Israel. His expressed eagerness to bomb the Aswan dam is at least the equivalent of Ahmadinejad’s reported desire to wipe Israel off the map.

Here I’ve committed the great sin of "moral equivalence," a crime that gets one banished to the Coventry of the "fringe," in elite foreign policy circles. Why, just imagine if we started applying to Israel the same moral tests and political standards we routinely apply to other nations around the world? Love, as Ayn Rand once remarked, "is exception-making," and so love-sick have we become that it is not even noticed that our secretary of state has met with the representative of a party that is openly and brazenly racist and fascist.

Right now, today, Palestinians are demonstrating peacefully in the occupied territories, protesting the demolition of their homes by the Israeli authorities and government-backed "settlers," descrying the shameful "Wall of Separation," and demanding an end to the daily indignities visited on them by the occupiers of their land. Yet we don’t see American web sites changing their colors in showy displays of narcissistic "solidarity." We don’t see 24/7 breathless blogger coverage of events as they unfold — heck, we don’t even hear about it at all. When the Israelis went into Gaza and killed thousands, injuring thousands more, these people were nowhere to be found: or, at any rate, there was a notable lack of breathlessness in their coverage, such as it was.

The entirely lop-sided and frankly manipulated stance taken by the US in the region — brazenly Israel-centric as it is — is not about to undergo any fundamental change simply because there’s a new man in the White House. Decades of this sort of unthinking bias will not be undone in a few months, or a few years. The Israel lobby has too much power, and is not about to give up without a tremendous fight. Yet there are certain objective circumstances that they cannot control.

The subordination of American to Israeli interests in the Middle East is causing untold damage to our relations with the rest of the world, and the fatal distortion of our policies is proving too costly to ignore. That’s why the Obama administration is being forced to take a fresh look at the requirements of the "special relationship," and signaling a new turn — one that is being resisted every step of the way by Tel Aviv.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-awaited answer to Obama’s Cairo speech is a clear indication that the Israelis are prepared to call the US President’s bluff — and a bluff it surely is. The Obamaites have their hands full as it is, what with their far-reaching economic agenda and the continuing meltdown of the American economy: as the Justice Department’s recent dropping of the espionage case against top Lobby officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman indicates, they are not about to take on Israel’s powerful amen corner. No, not even on the relatively easy issue of the "settlements."

Obama’s seeming deviation from AIPAC’s game plan is just a minor glitch, however, one that masks the continuation of the Israel-first policy that has overshadowed all attempts to steer a more rational Middle Eastern course. This continuity was underscored when, in answer to questions about the Iranian events, Obama told reporters:

"It’s important to understand that although there is some ferment taking place in Iran, that the difference between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised. Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons."

The supposedly oh-so-savvy and sympathetic Obama can’t be unfamiliar with accounts of Iran’s televised presidential debates, which did indeed dramatize deep differences between the two candidates, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. It was Mousavi, descrying Iran’s isolation, who turned to his opponent and asked: "Tell me, who are our friends in the region?" He berated Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust, a ploy, he averred, that had brought "shame" on Iran in the eyes of the world. Ahmadinejad came back with a perfectly Cheney-esque volley, as reported by the Washington Post:

"Ahmadinejad pointed out that the previous government, which temporarily suspended uranium enrichment from 2003 to 2005, received nothing in return for the gesture to the West. ‘There was so much begging for having three centrifuges. Today more than 7,000 centrifuges are turning,’ Ahmadinejad said of Iran’s nuclear program. ‘Which foreign policy was successful? Which one created degradation? Which one kept our independence more, which one gave away more concessions but got no results?’ he asked."

Contra Obama, the differences between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are potentially far greater than advertised, given the momentum of events and the implications of what is happening in the streets of Tehran — where over a million people are gathering as I write to protest the stealing of their votes. In which case, the Obama administration — in its negotiations with a government led in part by Mousavi — is going to have to prepare itself to take yes for an answer.

I would note that Obama’s skepticism in the face of the Green Revolution echoes the sourness of the Israelis, who are also disdaining Mousavi’s peacemaking credentials. As Meir Dagan, head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, recently testified before the Knesset:

"The reality in Iran is not going to change because of the elections. The world and we already know [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element…It is important to remember that he is the one who began Iran’s nuclear program when he was prime minister."

A Mousavi government in power in Tehran would not necessarily be friendlier to Israel, and yet it is unmistakably true that the sort of reflexive hostility to the US exhibited by Ahmadinejad would no longer prevail. The only way to effectively deny this — as Obama has done — is to conflate Israeli and American interests. Both Washington and Tel Aviv fully realize their interests are diverging, and yet neither side has been able to say so publicly, and unequivocally, for domestic political reasons. The Americans are constrained by their vociferous Israel lobby, just as the Netanyahu government is reined in by the unwillingness of the Israeli public to take on its biggest ally and chief sponsor.

The Iranian events underscore the ideological rigidity — and the political considerations — that make formulating and carrying out a rational Middle Eastern policy all but impossible. As Iran’s drama plays out on the world stage, and takes on a momentum all its own, the tumult — and the clueless response by even a very smart operator like Obama — underscores our own inability to see what is plainly and simply true — even as it hits us squarely in the face.

by Justin Raimondo, June 15, 2009 Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment Was it Daniel Pipes’ endorsement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that put the Holocaust-denying hard-liner over the top in Iran’s recent presidential "election"? Or was it the massive – and fairly obvious – fraud committed by the Ahmadinejad camp?

Joking aside, at least for the moment, one has to wonder: what else did anybody expect? Iranian elections have hardly been models of democratic governance in the past. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, prefigured the probable upshot of all this when he announced that a victory for leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi would amount to a repudiation of him personally – and the crackdown we are witnessing could only have come about as a direct result of Khamenei’s order.

The U.S. government – or, at least, one branch of it – didn’t help matters much. Their fast-tracking of draconian new sanctions on Iran right before Iranians went to the polls could only have helped Ahmadinejad. How’s that for timing?

In any case, the Mousavi challenge was a frontal assault on the legitimacy of the current regime, and they have responded just as tyrannical elites have always responded, with deadly force and brazen fraud.

Ahmadinejad has led his country into an economic dead end, with record unemployment, gas shortages, and a high inflation rate. That, combined with U.S. President Barack Obama’s remarkable outreach to the Iranians – a video message of friendship, an offer to negotiate with Iranian leaders without preconditions, and an unprecedented acknowledgment of the U.S. government’s role in overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in 1953 – would have sounded the death knell of the current gang if the election had been allowed to proceed unobstructed. As it was, the hard-liners sealed off Iran from the rest of the world as Mousavi’s overwhelming victory became apparent, placed the candidate under house arrest (or so it seems from numerous unconfirmed news reports), shut down the Internet, and unleashed their "Revolutionary Guards" on student-led protest demonstrations.

The swiftness of the hard-liner response, however, can be deceiving. Apparently, there was confusion in the Ahmadinejad camp as Mousavi’s victory loomed large. We are getting reports that the authorities informed Mousavi of his impending election victory before the polls had even closed, and he was advised to "moderate" his victory speech for fear of provoking a violent response from Ahmadinejad’s supporters, many of whom are members of the "revolutionary" militias. The reformist newspapers, too, were told they were not allowed to use the word "victory" in reference to Mousavi when reporting election results – but at least they were allowed to report it. Or so they thought.

Shortly afterward, however, these same newspapers were taken over by armed assailants, Mousavi’s election headquarters were surrounded by military forces under the hard-liners’ command, and the regime’s thugs were called out into the streets – where they met Mousavi’s mostly youthful supporters in bloody clashes throughout the country.

Like Juan Cole, I will readily admit that I may be wrong about the veracity of the hard-liner coup narrative, and I may very well have fallen for what some are calling the "North Tehran Fallacy" – the idea that Western reporters were lured into believing that Mousavi was the winner because they are all based in a relatively affluent and Westernized part of the Iranian capital. (Cole, by the way, denies the validity of the North Tehran thesis, though it seems plausible to me.) Yet that really has no relevance to the main point of this column, which is this: America has no business intervening in Iran’s internal affairs, including its presidential election. Period.

To do so would play right into the hands of Iran’s hard-liners – and their neoconservative cheerleaders (both overt and covert) in this country. Whatever support the kooky Ahmadinejad had managed to garner – according to leaked and unconfirmed reports, about 30 percent of the total – was due almost entirely to external factors, principally the U.S.-led campaign to strangle the Iranian economy and rile up ethnic and religious minorities. This, in turn, has redounded to the hard-liners’ benefit, as anti-Americanism – long a staple of Iranian politics – has reached record levels throughout the region.

So far, the Obama administration has kept its collective mouth shut pretty tight – except, of course, for Joe Biden – and that’s a good thing. What isn’t so good is that the White House will almost surely be forced to pronounce some sort of verdict or judgment on the apparently fraudulent election results. Criticism, however mild, coming from Washington, will surely be used by Ahmadinejad & Co. as a pretext to declare a state of "emergency" and engineer a total crackdown. And the possibility of a dramatic showdown between the two Iranian camps is increasing by the moment: Mousavi is reportedly calling for his followers to take to the streets in protest – although there is some fear that this may be a trap set by the regime – and what follows may very well turn out to be an Iranian replay of what happened in China’s Tiananmen Square, at least as far as the rest of the world sees it.

What this means, in terms of U.S. foreign policy, and the building "crisis" around U.S.-Iranian relations, is that the prospects for a negotiated settlement of the outstanding issues between the two countries have darkened considerably. Yes, I know Obama has declared his intention to soldier on in the "outreach" effort, but this will become increasingly untenable – and make it fairly easy for him to backtrack – as the authority and legitimacy of the Iranian government continues to deteriorate, as it will.

And we should not forget that, in spite of public assurances from the U.S. president that the administration wants peace, is prepared to negotiate, and that it’s time for "a new beginning," the Americans continue their covert action operations directed at Tehran – as recent bombings and other disturbances in the eastern non-Persian provinces have shown. Is the U.S. involved in the current street fighting in Tehran and other major cities? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to have this suspicion confirmed in coming days. After all, in 2007 Congress appropriated $400 million to destabilize the Iranian regime, and who’s to say this program isn’t bearing fruit?

U.S. military leaders are vehemently opposed to launching yet another war in the Middle East, and their stubborn resistance to the idea – floated by Bush’s neocon camarilla in the latter days of the Decider’s reign – scotched the War Party’s attempts to make sure Obama inherited a Middle East aflame. Yet their efforts will have reached beyond the previous administration’s grave – and succeeded in dragging Obama down with them into hell – if events in Iran provoke an ill-considered response from the U.S.

Whenever there are election "irregularities" anywhere outside the U.S., American government officials have a bad habit of getting up on their high horses and lecturing the rest of the world on how best to conduct their own internal affairs. Never mind that the U.S. itself has only two officially recognized political parties, both of which are subsidized with tax dollars, and that any potential rivals must jump through a number of hoops to even get on the ballot. We’re a legend in our own minds – the world’s greatest "democracy" – and anyone who questions this dubious claim is immediately charged with "anti-Americanism."

Yet even if that were not the case – even if our democratic procedures were flawless – that still wouldn’t give the U.S. government any standing to pass judgment, because how Iran conducts its presidential elections is not a legitimate concern of the U.S. government. The idea that the occupant of the Oval Office must pass moral judgment on all events, including other countries’ elections, is a byproduct of America’s imperial pretensions and delusions of "world leadership."

The Israel lobby, which has been pushing for a U.S. confrontation with Iran, is revving up its engines even now to push harder for increased sanctions and other provocative moves by the U.S. Obama, I fear, will prove unable to resist all that pressure, though I’d love to be proven wrong.

Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran? By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Leaders of the puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serioU.S. doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the U.S. Government.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.

Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”

What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?

Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.

However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*

The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:

“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

“The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over MoU.S.avi.

“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”

There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The U.S. media treats these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign media see these reports as evidence of the U.S. government’s inherent immorality.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

The success of the U.S. government in financing color revolutions in former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have been widely reported and discussed, with the U.S. media treating it as an indication of U.S. omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a sign of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Moussavi is a bought and paid for operative of the U.S. government. We know for a fact that the U.S. government has psychological warfare operations that target both Americans and foreigners through the U.S. and foreign media. Many articles have been published on this subject.

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western devotion to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared: “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.

As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack.

With the help of Moussavi, the U.S. government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American lives and money to liberate. Has Moussavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?

The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule of Iran in 1978. That is the script. You are watching it every minute on U.S. television.

There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among hundreds, we have Gary Sick, who formerly served on the National Security Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:

"If they'd been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51 percent," Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But the government's assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote, "is not credible."

"I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on repression. The voice of the people is ignored."

The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.

But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.

Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven prevail over others, morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is isolated and universally despised.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Iran is the best model of democracy in the world...a bunch of old guys called guardians will choose the persidential candidate...then Iranian would vote....this is problem if you are going allow religion mixing with politics....Iranians have been screwed since 1979.

U typical spineless muslims. Any rouble..blame someone.CIA etc etc as long as Americans/ allies. Why u let it happen, if it is so. Who's stupidity and greed does this?Learn to fix your own problems and stop blaming others!Nameless

From what I have read in the net so far, their (CIA/Israel/or whoever it is) intention is never to win the election. They know very well that Ahmedinejad is very popular among the Iranians.

The intention is solely to destabilise Iran, and looks like they have achieve their objective. Mousavi came in very late and there is no way he could win without comprehensive campaigning throughout Iran.

All they need is just to put in the seed in the form of Mousavi, and subsequent to the election, we can see all the concerted efforts being put in to create and fan the fire.

Ya..Isreal does want to attack both Lebanon and Iran..the problem with the mat sallehs is,they still think thier way,their system of governance is d best,and every nation must be colonised by western thots and ideals..they want a geek in iran(and Iran is full of geeks and nerds!!)..but,they tolerate 1/2 past 6 mentally retards khazaks isrealis like Lieberman!!In macam mana boleh?..super corrupt Abu Mazen is A ok,but physcist Ismail Haniya no ok.."hard liner" Ahamdinejad is a problemo,and geeky nerdy Ph.d holder Mousavi is now the darling..kepla hotak mat sallehs penuh with insects!!

Let me say this..as long as the emotinally and mentally bankrupt mat sallehs continue to push for thier way of doing things(the usal sh!tlah "democracy,human rights,candle light vigil,etc etc),and Isreal continue to be paranoid and afflicted(and no revolt within Isreal),there will be no peace in the middle east..

Is This the Culmination of Two Years of Destabilization Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?" By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs' lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad's attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.

Commentators are "explaining" the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad's win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine. It requires total blindness not to see this.

Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.

Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘color’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Tehran, Iran (TRN) -- The ongoing turmoil throughout Iran is a result of deliberate destabilization efforts conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Operating under an operation code named "Restore a Shah" the CIA has been quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars to activists throughout Iran in order to intentionally foment the tumultuous protests being seen in that country since their recent national election.

For more than two years, tens of millions of dollars in U.S. cash has been covertly smuggled into Iran by U.S. troops operating in Iraq. Sources inside the Pentagon have told TRN that much of that cash was recovered from former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The source went on to say that the funds were never reported to U.S. civilian leaders in order that the CIA could make use of that cash as it deemed appropriate, without congressional oversight.

Iran has long been on the radar screen of U.S. Intelligence agencies after the Iranian Revolution toppled the former Shah of Iran who was useful to the U.S.

During that Revolution, Iranians laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, occupying it and holding Embassy staff hostage for 444 days. One of the Iranian students who participated in that Embassy Siege was none other than Iran's current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

In the photo at right, taken by the CIA outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can be clearly seen holding onto a blindfolded American citizen who was a hostage from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Those hostages were physically abused, deprived of food and water, prevented form getting medical attention. It was only after Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. President in 1980, that the Iranians realized they had to let the hostages go.

Sources in the Reagan White House made known to reporters at the time that before his inauguration, Reagan passed a message to Iran telling them that unless the American Hostages were freed before he was sworn-in as President, his first official act would be to order carpet bombing of Tehran by U.S. military strikes.

Unlike former President Jimmy Carter who seemed paralyzed and unable to use force to free his own citizens, Reagan suffered no such fear. Minutes prior to Reagan's inauguration, Iran released all the U.S. Hostages, bringing the crisis to an end.

When US Intelligence agencies realized who the Iranian President was, and that he was personally one of the henchmen who held Americans captive in the late 1970's it was decided to undertake any and every effort to destroy his Presidency. But with no formal relations with Iran since the Embassy crisis, it was difficult for US Intelligence operatives to enter Iran and to establish contacts.

During the second war with Iraq, many U.S. operatives were able to successfully cross into Iran and bring with them tons of U.S. cash. That began laying the foundations for the present day turmoil in Iran.

The goal of the CIA: Topple the Iranian government and install another government which will be more secular and friendly to the U.S.

The news of alleged election fraud has spread through Tehran like wildfire, pitching ayatollah Rafsanjani’s supporters against ayatollah Khamenei’s in street confrontations. This chaotic situation is secretly stirred by the CIA which has been spreading confusion by flooding Iranians with contradicting SMS messages. Thierry Meyssan recounts this psychological warfare experiment.

In March 2000, the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that the Eisenhower administration organized a regime change in 1953 in Iran and that this historical event explained the current hostility of Iranians towards the United States. Last week, during the speech he addressed to Muslims in Cairo, President Obama officially recognized that « in the midst of the cold war the United States played a role in the toppling of a democratically elected Iranian government » [1].

At the time, Iran was controlled by a puppet monarchy headed by the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He had been placed on the throne by the British who forced his father, the pro-Nazi Cossack officer Reza Pahlavi to resign. However, the Shah had to deal with a nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh, with the help of ayatollah Abou al-Qassem Kachani, nationalized the oil resources [2]. Furious, the British persuaded the United States that the Iranian dissent needed to be stopped before the country became communist. The CIA then put together Operation Ajax to overthrow Mossadegh with the help of the Shah, and to replace him with Nazi general Fazlollah Zahedi who until then was detained by the British. Zahedi is responsible for having instituted the cruelest terror regime of the time, while the Shah would cover his exactions while parading for Western ‘people’ magazines.

Operation Ajax was lead by archeologist Donald Wilber, historian Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of president Theodore Roosevelt) and general Norman Schwartzkopf Sr. (whose son with the same name lead Operation Desert Storm). This operation remains a textbook example of subversion. The CIA came up with a scenario that gave the impression of a popular revolt when in reality it was a covert operation. The highpoint of the show was a demonstration in Tehran with 8 000 actors paid by the Agency to provide credible pictures to Western media [3].

Is History repeating itself? Washington renounced to a military attack on Iran and has dissuaded Israel to take such an initiative. In order to « change the regime », the Obama administration prefers to play the game of covert actions – less dangerous but with a more unpredictable outcome. After the Iranian presidential elections, huge demonstrations in the streets of Tehran are pitching supporters of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ali Khamenei on one side, to supporters of defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on the other. The demonstrations are a sign of a profound division in the Iranian society between a nationalist proletariat and a bourgeoisie upset at being held back from economic globalization [4]. With its covert actions, Washington is trying to weigh on the events to topple the re-elected president.

Once again, Iran is an experimental field for innovative subversive methods. CIA is relying in 2009 on a new weapon: control of cell phones. Since the democratization of mobile phones, Anglo-Saxon secret services have increased their interception capability. While wired phones’ tapping requires the installation of branch circuits – and therefore local agents, tapping of mobile phones can be done remotely using the Echelon network. However, this system cannot intercept Skype mobile phones communications, which explains the success of Skype telephones in conflict areas [5]. The National Security Agency (NSA) therefore lobbied world Internet Service Providers to require their cooperation. Those who accepted have received huge retribution [6].

In countries under their occupation —Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—, the Anglo-Saxons intercept all telephone communication, whether mobile or wired. The goal is not to obtain full transcripts of any given conversation, but to identify « social networks ». In other words, telephones are surveillance bugs which make it possible to know who anyone is in touch with. Firstly, the hope is to identify resistance networks.

Secondly, telephones make it possible to locate identified targets and «neutralize» them. This is why in February 2008, the Afghan rebels ordered various operators to stop their activity daily, from 5PM to 3AM, in order to prevent the Anglo-Saxons to follow their whereabouts. The relay antennas of those that refused to comply where destroyed [7].

On the contrary, with the exception of a telephone exchange which was accidentally hit, Israeli forces made sure not to hit telephone exchanges in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead from December 2008 to January 2009. This is a complete change in strategy. Since the Gulf War, the most prevalent strategy was colonel John A. Warden’s « five circles theory »: the bombing of telephone infrastructures was considered a strategic objective to both confuse populations and to cut communication lines between commanding centers and fighters. Now the opposite applies: telecommunication infrastructures must be protected. During the bombings in Gaza, the operator Jawwal [8] offered additional talk time to its users – officially to help them but de facto serving Israel’s interests. Going one step further, Anglo-Saxons and Israeli secrets services developed psychological warfare methods based on an extensive use of mobile phones. In July 2008, after the exchange of prisoners and remains between Israel and Hezbollah, robots placed tens of thousands of calls to Lebanese mobile phones. A voice speaking in Arabic was warning against participating in any resistance activity and belittled Hezbollah. The Lebanese minister of telecommunications, Jibran Bassil [9], files a complaint to the UN against this blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty [10]. Following the same approach, tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrians received an automatic phone call in October 2008 to offer them 10 million dollars for any information leading to the location and freeing of Israeli prisoners. People interested in collaborating were invited to call a number in the UK [11].

This method has now been used in Iran to bluff the population, to spread shocking news and to channel the resulting anger.

First, SMS were sent during the night of the counting of the votes, according to which the Guardian Council of the Constitution (equivalent to a constitutional court) had informed Mir-Hossein Mousavi of his victory. After that, the announcing of the official results — the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with 64 % of cast votes — seemed like a huge fraud. However, three days earlier, M. Mousavi and his friends were considering a massive victory of M. Ahmadinejad as certain and were trying to explain it by unbalanced campaigns. Indeed the ex president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was detailing his grievances in an open letter. The US polling institutes in Iran were predicting a 20 points lead for M. Ahmadinejad over M. Mousavi [12]. M. Mousavi victory never seemed possible, even if it is probable that some fraud accentuated the margin between the two candidates.

Secondly, Iranian citizens were selected or volunteered on the Internet to chat on Facebook or to subscribe to Twitter feeds. They received information —true or false— (still via SMS) about the evolution of the political crisis and the ongoing demonstrations. These anonymous news posts were spreading news of gun fights and numerous deaths which to this day have not been confirmed. Because of an unfortunate calendar overlap, Twitter was supposed to suspend its service for a night to allow for some maintenance of its systems. The US State Department intervened to ask them to postpone it [13]. According to the New York Times, these operations contributed to spread defiance in the population [14].

Simultaneously, in a new type of effort, the CIA is mobilizing anti-Iranian militants in the United States and in the United Kingdom to increase the chaos. A Practical Guide to revolution in Iran was distributed to them, which contains a number of recommendations, including: set Twitter accounts feeds to Tehran time zone; centralize messages on the following Twitter accounts @stopAhmadi, #iranelection and #gr88 ; official Iranian State websites should not be attacked. « Let the US military take care of it » (sic). When applied, these recommendations make it impossible to authenticate any Twitter messages. It is impossible to know if they are being sent by witnesses of the demonstrations in Tehran or by CIA agents in Langley, and it is impossible to distinguish real from false ones. The goal is to create more and more confusion and to push Iranians to fight amongst themselves.

Army general staffs everywhere in the world are closely following the events in Tehran. They are trying to evaluate the efficiency of this new subversion method in the Iranian experimental field. Evidently, the destabilization process worked. But it is unclear if the CIA will be able to channel demonstrators to do what the Pentagon has renounced to do, and what they do not want to do themselves : to change the regime and put an end to the Islamic revolution.